


self portrait as anathema

by quietkids



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: M/M, Pre and Post Time Skip, sakusa character study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:27:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26461918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietkids/pseuds/quietkids
Summary: 17. Atsumu’s fingers hovering over Kiyoomi’s chest, his touch lilac. Kiyoomi recoiling at his gentleness, his reverence. The morning light spilling over his head, his dark-blue-black curls, and Atsumu pulling away. He had looked at Kiyoomi, his eyes clear-brown, with such intent, it had made Kiyoomi feel naked. He had felt naked.28 parts on what it means to be touched vs. what it means to be seen.
Relationships: Miya Atsumu/Sakusa Kiyoomi
Comments: 15
Kudos: 135





	self portrait as anathema

**Author's Note:**

> this was v experimental and form/tone heavily inspired by maggie nelson's _bluets!!_ i hope you enjoy : )
> 
>  **content warnings:** family mentions in 2, 14. drowning in 8, 15. smoking/drinking throughout.

“To be seen is the penalty.”

— Anne Carson, _Red Doc >_

* * *

  1. Kiyoomi lets himself believe in infatuation, but never anything else. Short-lived and scarlet red. Desire held under his tongue, dissolving like an acid tab, the world shaking, saturation trailing between fingertips. 
  
  
  

  2. When he was younger, his mother told him to learn to love himself before he loved anyone. She did not tell him what it means to be loved, or how to be loved. Even when Kiyoomi was a child, he understood his mother was sadder than most mothers, melancholy curving her shoulders with its weight, and that his father did not love the same way other fathers did. Or whether he had loved anyone at all. 
  
  
  

  3. In the morning, Kiyoomi watches the sunrise. A compulsion, but he deludes himself by calling it routine. Sunrises have always been less violent than sunsets, carving out spaces for the morning light, tinged pink, rather than ultramarine darkness, ink black, pooling. What it means to carve out beauty and not violence. 
  
  
  

  4. Atsumu smiles at Sakusa the first time they see each other, his tongue trailing over the ridges of his teeth, the bright yellow fluorescence of the gym flickers. Electricity crawls over the divot between his back and his collarbone. 
  
  
  

  5. The first time Kiyoomi touches someone is in college. They had both been drunk, breathless, pink-purple longing swelling in their chests. The room had been dark the entire time, hands trailing from chest to navel to hips—Kiyoomi does not remember their face, their voice, maybe not even their body, just the ripple of muscle under his fingertips, the way the nameless, faceless boy’s fingers had pressed onto the vertebrae on the nape of Kiyoomi’s neck with enough force to make him shudder. The body, remaining clothed, in darkness. 
  
  
  

  6. James Baldwin, _Giovanni’s Room:_ “‘Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home.’” 
  
  
  

  7. Atsumu’s hands around Kiyoomi’s neck. A warm afternoon, light spilling between their legs. The room wavering. 
  
  
  

  8. As a child, Kiyoomi was taught to swim. His mother, when telling the story, uses the word obsession. Consuming. The time, at the summer house in Okinawa, with his grandparents, where he had disappeared, and they had found him floating. He was so young, she says. Kiyoomi does not know why she tells this story like it had been a tragedy, an almost-tragedy. The wetness sinking into his bones, light bouncing off of his skin. He does not remember what had happened before. What had happened after. Maybe he had seen the waves pushing and pulling, the yellow buoy lines on the horizon, and he had wondered what it meant to disappear, to be submerged. Now, twenty-six, the water from his 3 AM bath slipping in between his fingers, Kiyoomi shudders. Treading the threshold between breathing and drowning, being and not-being, where the body is at once a weight and weightless. 
  
  
  

  9. Kiyoomi knows he is a beautiful boy. 
  
  
  

  10. Atsumu had asked him about the face mask one night, the TV playing nothing but black and white static, the ceiling fan spinning, the shitty paint job on the ceiling peeling. _What about it,_ Kiyoomi had said. _I mean, you let people touch you. You let me touch you._ Sakusa’s hand tightening around Atsumu’s thigh. _It’s not about being touched._ Atsumu gasping, the TV screen gone black. _It’s never been about being touched._
  
  
  

  11. The overnight flight to Italy, in December. His first V-League tournament, his last year of university. The rest of the plane had been asleep, Kiyoomi’s head wavering from the altitude sickness. The cabin lights turned off, everyone bathed in sapphire, the old man in the row in front of him softly snoring. A pretty boy in the last row, the curve of his Adam’s apple outlined by the darkness. The two of them had been quiet, strung between two continents. Their bodies in darkness; suspended in perpetual flight. Kiyoomi’s body, in the pale of the morning of the next day, littered with bruises, looks like porcelain. Roped off, sheathed behind glass. 
  
  
  

  12. _Cathexis:_ the investment of psychic energy in objects outside the self. Ignorance, dissolution of the self. A willful one? 
  
  
  

  13. Atsumu’s hair had been shit piss blonde the first time Kiyoomi had seen him. Box bleach and fried ends. Kiyoomi had wanted to reach over, tear it out of his scalp. A four on four match during All-Japan. Across the net, Atsumu pushes his bangs back with his hands, sweat dripping down his temple. Kiyoomi watches him. 
  
  
  

  14. Kiyoomi gets older. He learns more about his parents. Most people do. Trips home during the summer off-season, winter holidays. He watches his mother and father at the dinner table, seated at opposite ends. They do not talk. They do not touch each other, either. The silence reverberating. 
  
  
  

  15. At his grandparent’s house, in the ocean, he had felt an inexplicable calmness, his head barely above water. 
  
  
  

  16. Kiyoomi knows he is a beautiful boy, and he considers himself lucky for this. A beautiful boy does not need to be known. 
  
  
  

  17. Atsumu’s fingers hovering over Kiyoomi’s chest, his touch lilac. Kiyoomi recoiling at his gentleness, his reverence. The morning light spilling over his head, his dark-blue-black curls, and Atsumu pulling away. He had looked at Kiyoomi, his eyes clear-brown, with such intent, it had made Kiyoomi feel naked. He had felt naked. 
  
  
  

  18. His roommate in his second year teaches him how to roll a joint, how to pack a bowl, how to smoke until he feels like absolutely nothing. The room around him feeling like nowhere and everywhere, his body a set of parts to be assembled and disassembled. He stumbles into the bathroom mirror one night, the moles above his eyebrows floating across his forehead, and he cups his hands under the sink faucet, the frigidity of the water feeling like an act of alienation. 
  
  
  

  19. _You have to touch me, Miya. You have to touch me._
  
  
  

  20. Kiyoomi comes back from university and enters the V-League, with four more years of knowledge on biochemistry and ancient Japanese literature and nothing more. Miya Atsumu smiles at him again, his hair no longer shit-piss-blonde and instead ash-honey blonde, reflective. _Where have you been?_ The gym with glass panes. The light shifting, the afternoon melting into dusk, each time, Atsumu made into a more beautiful person. Kiyoomi, possessed by phototaxis. 
  
  
  

  21. They had fucked that night, in a motel room by the highway, and they had smoked after. Atsumu staring at him all the while, Kiyoomi unsure of what he was looking at in the darkness. The flame on the lighter trembling, Kiyoomi’s Cupid’s bow glowing orange. A small mole underneath his chin, Atsumu reaching out. The lighter, his favorite, morning glories carved into the metal, clattering to the floor. 
  
  
  

  22. Touch; displacement. 
  
  
  

  23. Kiyoomi was born in Tokyo. Once, at a family dinner party, on the balcony of a high-rise apartment, a cousin of his had once asked Kiyoomi whether he wanted to move somewhere quieter when he grew older, maybe Hokkaido, with its lavender fields, or in Oita, away from the city. Kiyoomi had shrugged his shoulders, and his cousin had gone back inside. Kiyoomi had stayed, his hands dangling over the edge, Tokyo underneath. A strange sense of solitude. Maybe there had been someone on the street looking up at him, his face dark and body backlit by the warm orange glow of the party where everyone was drunk but not happy. In Tokyo, Kiyoomi can slip away. His body, lost in bright red, neon. 
  
  
  

  24. After that morning, where Kiyoomi had felt naked, where his body had suddenly been made his own again, he had told Atsumu to leave. Atsumu had looked sad, his eyes downturned and his lashes made longer by morning shadows, and had opened his mouth to say something. Perhaps if he had begged to stay, or even just asked, Kiyoomi would have let him. But Atsumu had left instead, wordlessly. After he does, Kiyoomi returns to his room and closes the blinds. Something in him changed, irrevocably. 
  
  
  

  25. He watches the sunset. Red spilling over the horizon, pools of ink-black darkness bleeding over the city. 
  
  
  

  26. Ocean Vuong: “The body is the ultimate witness to love.” 
  
  
  

  27. Kiyoomi learns to touch himself. It comes easy. First, in the darkness. He does not look at his hands. Instead, the shower faucet rusting at the edges, the cream-white tiles cracked. His neighbor’s clothesline swaying in the wind. 
  
  
  

  28. When he is touched, Kiyoomi learns what it means to beg for absolution. 
  
  
  



**Author's Note:**

> i hope u enjoyed !!! i diverged i think a bit from fanon's primary interpretation of sakusa's implied mysophobia but it was just my personal reading and i hope you enjoyed nonetheless!
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/atskta) \+ [cc](https://curiouscat.qa/osakis)


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